It is well known that employees have certain legal obligations to their employer with respect to the content of their social media profiles. An arbitrator recently confirmed that employers also need to be careful about the content of their social media pages as it relates to their employees.

When used properly, social media can be a powerful tool for connecting individuals, marketing businesses and mobilizing the masses behind a cause. However, many organizations have learned the hard way that inappropriate social media use by employees can have a detrimental effect on an organization’s reputation.

Since the beginning of time, employees have privately complained about work and made inappropriate comments to friends and family. Today, however, this venting is happening over the Internet. The internet has major reach and many employees, including professors, sports figures, comedians and writers, have already been terminated because of their Facebook and Twitter activity.

Ever since the days that employment law was referred to as “master and servant” law, employees have owed various common-law duties and, for some employees, fiduciary obligations to their employer. These obligations take many forms, but key is that an employee cannot misappropriate an employer’s confidential or proprietary information. In the days before social media, this was fairly easy to describe. Generally speaking, an employee could not print or email to himself a copy of the employer’s customer list, and then use that list to compete against the employer. But what if that customer list is not a document, but is kept on a LinkedIn page?

More than 19 million Canadians check Facebook at least once per month and 14 million check every day. There are more than 200 million active users of Twitter, and around 400 million tweets sent daily. LinkedIn boasts 8 million Canadian users. These stats confirm what you probably already know: your employees are on social media. They are likely on social media multiple times a day, which means that they are likely using social media at work.

It is understandably frustrating for employers and human resources managers to try keep up with social media trends. It seems that as soon as employers (or anyone over the age of 25) has figured out the latest social media tool, the masses have moved on to the next one. Likewise it is almost impossible to amend or adapt a “social media” policy with each shift in trend.

Recently, there has been much news about social media getting people in trouble at work and in the public eye. From politicians losing their positions in office, to businesses firing both upper management and employees for “inappropriate tweets,” it’s clear that a social media policy for businesses is becoming a required element of any effective set of HR solutions.